Today I learned that I can make image ads pretty easily. I've been redesigning the homepage for this intranet site I'm working on, and part of the new design is one of those rotating slideshows. I played around with different sizes and layouts, read up on ad design, and mocked up a few ideas. Tada! Now I do graphic design. (Well, a bit.) This weekend, I'll see if I can make up one of those for my little e-book.

I've been thinking about what I want to learn how to do. On this engagement, I want to learn more about graphic design, web design, writing, and maybe a bit more Javascript development.

For myself, I want to:

learn more about e-book writing, editing, and formatting: I really enjoyed putting together that e-book with the highlights from the past ten years of my blog posts. I liked making that PDF, and I want to learn how to make beautiful and usable EPUBs too. I want to put together information on Emacs, self-tracking, experimenting with business, happiness… You know, make a dent in that list of book ideas I blogged about last year, and come up with more ideas along the way.

learn Android app development for tablets and phones: I like the Android app ecosystem more than the iOS one, even though the iOS world is flashier. I love the way tablets and phones are turning computing into an everyday-at-your-fingertips experience, and I want to help imagine ways that we can make even better use of these capabilities.

build Emacs resources: It's an awesome editor, and I want to help more people learn how to use it.

learn how to build more tools with Rails or WordPress, maybe? They're both great ways to build websites, and it would be fun to figure out how to build more sophisticated tools.

One of the reasons why I like Rails, Drupal, and WordPress is because those platforms have lots and lots of third-party code. Lisp is neat, but I’d have to write much more myself instead of being able to take advantage of other people’s hard work. =)